Bash 5 reference · 14 entries

Bash Text and System Tools

Linux tools used with Bash: grep, sed, awk, cut, sort, uniq, tr, find, xargs, head, tail, wc, chmod, tar, ps and kill.

Name	Description	Since
`grep`	Search files or input for lines matching a pattern, with options for case, counts, context, recursion and regex.
`sed`	Edit text streams: substitute with s/old/new/, delete or print lines by number or pattern, and edit files in place.
`awk`	Process text by fields: print and filter columns, compute sums and group totals, with a small built-in language.
`cut`	Extract columns from each line by delimiter and field number, or by character positions.
`sort`	Sort lines alphabetically, numerically, in reverse, by a key column, or with human-readable sizes; -u removes duplicates.
`uniq`	Remove or count adjacent duplicate lines; sort first, then use -c to count occurrences or -d to show only duplicates.
`tr`	Translate, squeeze or delete characters, such as changing case, removing carriage returns or splitting words onto lines.
`find`	Find files and directories by name, type, size, age or permissions, and act on them with -exec, -delete or xargs.
`xargs`	Build and run commands from input lines, in batches or in parallel; pair with find -print0 and xargs -0 for safe file names.
`head and tail`	Show the first or last lines of files, skip headers, and follow growing log files with tail -f.
`wc`	Count lines, words, characters and bytes in files or input; wc -l is the usual way to count lines or results.
`chmod`	Change file permissions with symbolic modes (u+x, go-w) or octal numbers (755, 644, 600), optionally recursively.
`tar`	Create, list and extract archives, usually gzip-compressed .tar.gz files, preserving directory structure and permissions.
`ps and kill`	List processes with ps and send signals with kill: SIGTERM to ask a process to stop, SIGKILL only as a last resort.